Decay

The picture above was snapped recently while out walking the dog. What you see is a detail of a metal signboard that has been corroded by the weather and invaded by ivy tendrils. How long has the signboard undergone this attrition? Difficult to say, but probably not that long, and the only reason it’s still there is because it belongs to an abandoned property and so no one has gotten round to removing it.

One reason I took the photograph is because It’s unusual to find such time-worn surfaces here in South Korea. Everything looks new, that is, without a history. Why is this? This question is especially interesting to me because I find surfaces like this that carry the random textures of time very poignant and aesthetically pleasing. But Koreans, on the whole, don’t seem to have a sensibility attuned to enjoying such surfaces. Why?

Koreans seem to have a different sense of time, or of how quickly the ‘past’ becomes the ‘old’.  In this context, the word ‘old’ implies the moribund, redundant, diminished, and lacking in economic value. In short, there’s nothing appealing about being ‘old’. Is this why almost all Koreans dye their hair black as they age? As grey hair is a primary signifier of being ‘old’, it’s not something a society bent on the ‘’young’ and the ‘new’ wants to display. In fact, one could say that Koreans  strive very hard to erase any signs of age – both in themselves and their built environments.  The lifespan of  a new building  is deemed to be around thirty years. I will never forget the day ten years go when some young acquaintances of my wife said they lived in an ‘old’ apartment. When I asked when it was built, they said, in the 1980s! Koreans always buy new cars regularly. Vintage clothes and second-hand goods in general are not appealing. They don’t want something ‘used’ or, as the current euphemism has it, ‘pre-loved’ (ugh!)

One reason for the animus against the past is that for Koreans it is perceived as traumatic. The first half of the twentieth century was a disaster for their country. The Korea of the second half of the century experienced rapid economic progress, but while this economic development brought immense benefits, it also, in a sense, inadvertently consolidated what Japanese colonial rule had begun: the severing of modern Korea from its rich and unique past.

Where I come from, old weathered surfaces are common. We live surrounded by tangible traces of the past in our built environments, with stones and bricks which endure for centuries. Our ‘modernization front’, as the Swiss philosopher Bruno Latour describes it, advanced much more slowly than here in Korea. The Industrial Revolution was, by comparison, an ‘Industrial Evolution’. It  began tentatively in the mid-eighteenth century in England, and so the replacement of the ‘old’ by the ‘new’, the superseding of what was deemed obsolete and redundant, occurred over a much longer period of time and has been far less total. Korea’s economic ‘miracle’ only goes back three generations. It also occurred in what was virtually a tabula rasa – a ruined country decimated by colonial rule and war. After 1953 and the cessation of fighting, there literally wasn’t much ‘old’ Korea left standing.

The westernizing modernization that South Korea embarked upon is premised on the idea that history has a single and developmental direction heading from the past through the present to the future. Consequently, the people of the present must escape the pull of the past on the journey to the future. As Bruno Latour writes in a context that assumes a western reader but which when read here seems to speak directly to the South Korean situation:

What had to be abandoned in order to modernize was the Local…….It is a Local through contrast. An anti-Global. …Once these two poles have been identified, we can trace a pioneering frontier of modernization. This is the line drawn by the injunction to modernize, an injunction that prepared us for every sacrifice: for leaving our native province, abandoning our traditions, breaking with our habits, if we want to ‘get ahead,’ to participate in the general movement of development, and, finally, to profit from the world.

For a nation bent on modernization, the Local is equated with the ignorant, the antiquated, the redundant, the valueless. With failure. In this sense, we can perceive the worn surface pictured above as a sign of the Local that is abandoned because it carries the stain of an archaic past that must be erased as society moves forward into the better future.   And, in a rapidly modernizing country like South Korea, ‘the archaic past’ can be very recent history - just a few years ago.

But this doesn’t of course mean that modern-day Korea has no past. What it means, however, is that this past can only exist as pre-packaged and scrubbed clean heritage. ‘Old’ historical buidlings are often modern recreations, like Gyeonbokgung Palace in Seoul, which is a kind of ‘zombie’ palace, in that it has all been recently rebuilt and therefore seems lifeless – although people love to go there dressed up in rented pretend hanbok costumes and use it as a backdrop for their selfies. In my experince, historical buidlings in Korea mostly lack aura - by which I mean, a distinctive atmosphere or quality that seems to surround and is generared by them. But this might just be because I’m not Korean. Or, it might be because aura isn’t something that can be consciously produced or manufactured. In relation to built structures, it’s a kind of spatial resonance that is associated with the time-worn, the random, the unproductive, the neglected.

The contemporary Korean animus against the ‘old’ is rather surprising, however, insofar as South Korean society still also clings to the conventions of Confucian age-hierarchy, which means different forms of language are necessary when talking ‘up’ to older people and ‘down’ to younger. It’s normal for Koreans to say in English that someone is a ‘junior’ or a ‘senior’ in relation to them, which sounds odd to westerners.  One of the first questions a Korean will ask you is your year of birth; this is so they know if you’re a ‘senior’ or a ‘junior.’ They also venerate their ancestors. And yet…..

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How to have a living relationship with the past? One way is to consciously live with it’s traces. Without them, how can one exist in anything but a shallow present? This might have been sufficient when the future seemed to be a golden invitation. Today, it is not. So, we end up stranded in a present divested of both the appeal of the Local and the Global.

Bruno Latour’s discussion in the book from which I have quoted, unfolds within what he terms the ‘new climatic regime’, by which he means the crisis caused by humanly-engineered climate change. Latour argues that the old binary of the ‘attractors’ Local and Global which dominated the modern period (and determined South Korea’s modern identity) cannot permit us to confront the challenges of the Anthropocene. Instead, these poles need to be   linked to a third, which Latour calls the ‘Terrestrial.’ By this, he means the ‘attractor’ of Planet Earth itself.

It seems to me that living surrounded by time-textured and humanly-made surfaces is one important part of being Terrestrially-minded. These traces remind us of our finitude. Ultimately, they are memento mori. They show us that everything decays and passes away.

 NOTES

 My quotes come from: Bruno Latour, Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime, translated by Catherine Porter (Polity  Press, 2018)